Adventure at the Chateau D'Or Review

Summary

Rating:

Overall:The graphics and background music are the high points of Chateau
d'Or, along with the "edutainment" value of the historical
knowledge of France. The lack of any significant story line,
non-intuitive nature of the puzzles, difficulty in navigating through
the game, tedious repetition of needless actions, and annoying
character interactions make the game's brevity quite welcome.

Adventure at the Chateau d'Or has the potential to be not only
a great adventure game, but an outstanding edutainment title, as
well. A good part of the game focuses on the history of Paris, and of
France in general. There is encyclopedic detail on many of the key
people and events in France's past. But the implementation of the game
is severely hampered by poor design, a lack of story, bad video
integration, and incredibly non-intuitive gameplay. The only saving
grace is that it is a short game.

The tag line from the game manual is initially eye-catching: "A modern
day princess finds herself caught up in a mysterious adventure when
she receives a cryptic letter summoning her to the palace of her
deceaseed uncle, the Duke. Your task is to help the princess unlock
the secret of the Chateau d'Or and claim her inheritance." And, in
fact, as the game begins, it shows a lot of promise. But the promise
is never fulfilled, and I was left feeling terribly short-changed.

The graphics in Chateau d'Or look, at first, like most other
good adventure games -- with fairly well-rendered buildings and
landscapes. However, as you begin to traverse the game, you find that
they are very "seamy," and often even confusing. And the farther into
the game you go, the worst the rendering is, often resulting in "flat"
2D appearances.

The background music is primarily soft jazz or classical music, which
suits the environment very well. As the player moves around the game
-- particulary from room to room of this gigantic chateau -- the music
changes to suit the mood of the environment. There are also occasional
ambient sounds, such as doors opening and closing.

Gameplay is perhaps the first, and foremost, shortcoming of Chateau
d'Or. It is, as has already been said, a very short game. Playing
with one other veteran gamer, we finished the game in 3-4 hours. But
given the other problems in the game, its brevity may have been its
salvation, as well.

There is no smooth movement from scene to scene; the scenes move from
still shot to still shot, in much the same way as Myst. There
are no panoramas, something becoming increasingly popular in current
games and obviously missing from Chateau d'Or. Additional
confusion was caused by the inconsistent manner in which the user
moved from one scene to another. In some places, clicking on the right
side of the screen caused a 90-degree turn to the right; in other
places, it resulted in a complete 180-degree turnaround. And in all
cases, a definite vertical seam moved across the screen, as the new
scene replaced the old.

Working with the inventory was also frustrating. In some places, the
game required the user to select an item from inventory, then click
somewhere in the current scene, to make use of the object. In other
places, simply selecting the correct item from the inventory caused it
to be "used."

A map showing the layout of the chateau was essentially useless. There
was no indication of orientation as I moved around the game. I
frequently found myself looking at the map and not being able to
figure out which way I was facing, then having to move in some random
direction and check the map again just to see which way I
moved. Another thing that would have enhanced gameplay tremendously
would be the ability to "warp" to a previously-visited location by
clicking on it on the map -- an option that many adventure games
provide. Not so with Chateau d'Or; to move from one location to
another involves traversing whatever lies between the two points.

At the very beginning, the only way to progress beyond the most
elementary stages of the game is to answer five random questions
(presented to you by an apparition of the dead Duke) about the history
of France. The answers are contained elsewhere in the chateau -- in
books that must be read (roughly 50 pages of reading!), video tapes
that must be watched, and computer programs to run. However, none of
the information presented in these media could be saved or carried
with the user; everything had to be remembered, in the hopes that when
the next question was asked, you might have the correct
answer. Furthermore, once a question was asked, you had to answer
immediately; you could not go back to research the answer, since by
the time you returned, a new question would be asked.

There are really almost no puzzles to speak of. The developers would,
I am sure, point to a couple of instances that they might interpret
as puzzles. However, they all involved virtually no logic, no
forethought, almost no reasoning, and tons of trial-and-error. And in
some cases, these "puzzles" had to be repeated frequently, such as to
gain access to a particular room that was required to be revisited
often. Thus, tedium became another outstanding characteristic of these
puzzles.

While playing the game is fairly "safe," there is one -- and only one
-- spot where, if you do not do things precisely correctly, and within
a very limited time frame, you will die. Now, that's not completely
unusual for a game of this kind, although timed puzzles do tend to be
rare. However, what made it entirely unacceptable was the fact that a)
you could not save a game immediately before the situation in
question, but had to save it a bit earlier (resulting in a lot of
replaying once you died); b) it was actually impossible to do
everything that was required in the time limit given, and you had to
revisit the situation several times, just to take it all in; and c)
once you died, the game provides no restart or return to anywhere
prior to the situation, so saving games regularly becomes critical.

Throughout the game, there are video clips that allow the princess to
speak with you. Not only do her dialogues rarely provide any help at
all in terms of pursuing the game's end, but she is also a very
annoying character, and I was beginning to wonder if I really wanted
to save her at all.

I also encountered several bugs in the game. In one spot, there was no
sound for a video clip in which the princess was talking to me. In
several other spots, system error messages came up, and terminated the
game.

Finally, the game has a fairly disappointing ending. Because it is so
short a game, the ending comes almost unexpectedly. And when it does,
you're not quite sure that the game is over! Only after waiting for
some time and eventually seeing the credits roll on the screen, are
you sure that was, indeed, the end of the game.

Adventure at the Chateau d'Or provides an interesting graphical
landscape, as well as a great deal of historical information about
French history. However, these are not enough to prevent it from
being a poorly designed game with minimal challenge, and little to
hold the interest of an adventure gamer.